How not to be wrong, the hidden maths of everyday life – by Jordan Ellenberg

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Over 2 months on a book isn’t going to help at all with my 30 books in a year, but I promise it was a good book!

It’s full of interesting thoughts on lotteries, perspective, statistics, music, correlation, voting systems, sports, all sorts! Complicated in places, but he always starts a section at a level we can all understand, and at some points I just had to just read the words to get to the point I understood the next bit, but it’s all written in a way that makes it fairly easy to read!

That all said, it was lovely to delve back into the world of maths, stretching my brain, seeing what I could remember, and enjoying some of the common sense that is shared.

As with any book of this sort it is of course full of gems, so here are some I particularly enjoyed:

“Dividing one number by another is mere computation; figuring out what you should divide by what is mathematics.”

“Improbable things happen a lot.”

“The natural logarithm is the one you always use if you’re a mathematician or if you have e fingers.”

“Mathematics as currently practised is a delicate interplay between monastic contemplation and blowing stuff up with dynamite.”

“In real life, mathematicians are a pretty ordinary bunch, no madder than the average.”

“I’ve found that in moments of emotional extremity there is nothing like a math[sic] problem to quiet the complaints the rest of the psyche serves up.”

“I encourage you to write directly in the book, if it’s not borrowed from the library or displayed on a screen.”

“An inelegant axiom is like a stain in the corner of the floor; it doesn’t get in your way, per se, but it’s maddening, and one spends an inordinate amount of time scrubbing and scouring and trying to make the surface nice and clean.”

“Genius is a thing that happens, not a kind of person.”

“[The stereotype is that mathematicians are] determined to compute everything to as many decimal places as possible. It isn’t so. We want to compute everything to as many decimal places as necessary.”